Report from Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing
                                  --  Tsujii Jun'ichi,  Hiroshi Nakagawa

1.Organization and Activity of AFNLP

The members of AFNLP are: AIRS, Australasian Language Technology
Association, Association of NLP(Japan), Chinese and Oriental Language
Information Processing Society, Singapore Chinese and Oriental Languages
Information Processing Society, Indonesian Language Technology - Research
Community (ILT-RC),  Int'l Conf. on Computer Processing of Oriental
Languages, NLP Assoc. of India (NLPAI), PACLIC, PACLING, SIG on Korean
Language Computing, The Association for Computational Linguistics and
Chinese Language Processing, Taiwan, etc.

AFNLP approved its revised Chapter of Conferences Coordination Committee on
9/28/2002, in which the relation between ACL and AFNLP is stated as : AFNLP
will keep its current form and role, and welcome the future cooperation with
ACL. (cf. Appendix)

Benjamin Tsuo (Hong Kong) is elected as the first president of AFNLP is and
Jun'ichi Tsujii(Japan) is elected as the vice president at AFNLP meeting on
March 22, 2004.

2.IJCNLP04

IJCNLP is the flagship conference of AFNLP. The first IJCNLP: IJCNLP-04 has
been held in Sanya, Hainan Island, China, on March 22-24, 2004. 211
submissions were received from 19 different regions (80% from Asia, 10% from
North America, 10% from Europe). 66 Oral presentations and 35 poster
presentations were accepted. The number of participants is about 250.

The conference is organized by the many people including:
Conference Co-chairs: Guangnan Ni (Chinese Academy of Engineering, Beijing),
Benjamin Tsou (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
Program Committee Co-chairs: Keh-Yih Su (Behavior Design Corporation,
Taipei), Jun-ichi Tsujii (University of Tokyo, Tokyo)
Local Organising Committee Chair: Youqi Cao (Chinese Information Processing
Soceity of China, Beijing
(Vice Chair) Maosong Sun (Tsinghua University, Beijing) (External Liaison
Person)


3.IJCNLP05

IJCNLP-05 will be organized by Prof. Lee, Jong-Hyeok at Jeju Island, Korea
around November.
Note: IJCNLP is held every two year, however IJCNLP04 was originally planned
to be held in 2003, but postponed by the delay of establishing AFNLP. Thus
the second conference comes to be IJCNLP05.

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Appendix: Defining AFNLP's role when ACL conferences are in Asia: Issues
(stated at ACL Winter EXEC meeting by Martha Palmer and Jun'ichi TSUJII.
(But many things are still to be solved.)

ACL will hold conferences in Asia every 3 years.  AFNLP will hold
conferences every 2 years.  Once every 6 years the conferences will be in
the same year.  The first time that will happen is
2009.  The ACL Exec would like to clarify the role that AFNLP will play with
respect to ACL conferences, both in the years when the conferences could
potentially overlap, and also in the years when they do not.

There are several issues to be addressed.

In the years when both ACL and AFNLP are scheduled to hold an Asian
conference, there are several possibilities:

   - there could be one joint conference, like ACL/Coling, with a
     Coordinating Committee made up jointly of ACL Exec members and AFNLP
Exec members.
   - there could be 2 parallel, co-located conferences, as we did in
Seattle.
   - there could be two conferences, spaced several months apart.  In which
case, AFNLP still might be involved in assisting with local  arrangements
for the ACL conference - choosing the site, etc.
   - there could be just an ACL conference, with AFNLP helping with the
     organization, more like NAACL and EACL do.  In which case, should
     AFNLP also share in the profits, like NAACL and EACL do?  This
     presupposes a close tie between ACL and AFNLP, which may be perceived
as
     ACL having more control than it currently does. In any event, no matter
how the coinciding conferences are handled,
  - Should the proceedings of AFNLP conferences be handled the same way as
      ACL conference proceedings?